I also have the Crosshair V Formula board and a 1100 AMD. I waited too long to do a hardcore burn in since the MB was hard to come by and my parts came in as they became available at discounts.

Don't worry too much fine tuning the MB settings. Use the Auto Tune from the OS to make it easy.

Watch your temps on MB and GPU. Download the MSI Afterburner from MSI. Install all the software from ASUS. It sounds like you have enough experience to understand about using good thermal compund between heat sinks and CPU if you've built other systems before. The stock heatsink appears to be adequate for mild OC. You may find that depending on your case size and cooling that 3.8Ghz is close to the max you will get and still stay stable. I was at 3.9 for about a week and completely stable when my CPU took a dump even though the temps never got over 68C. I ordered a new CPU immediately since I'd already had the CPU for two weeks before my MB showed up and by the time I installed it and the GPU which arrived a week later my window to return the CPU only left me a few days to test. For some reason the MB had a problem with OC in BIOS. I believe it let the smoke out of my first CPU since almost immediately after I ran a BIOS based OC it locked up and I didn't have the ability to check temps again. I thought I was going to have to RMA my board but when the new CPU came the system booted fine again after it was in.

Download some free benchmarks to test the system. Don't worry about OC right away. Get a good feel for what it will do stock first. Get some baseline readings so you know what effect your future changes (OC) will have. Again, watch temps.

From my research it would appear that 8GB of compatible memory will run well. I have 16GB and that took some work to get stable at 1522Ghz mem speed. Getting the CPU stable should take only minor effort unless you really want to push the envelope, and then it might cause a bit of frustration unless you have adequate cooling to get stable over the 4Ghz level. Getting the memory OC just right will take some time and experimentation depending on the memory specs. Once you find benchmarking tools and run the system at 100% CPU, 100% Memory use, 100% GPU utilization long enough to get the system to settle in to a temperature that is under the max the components can handle, you will have your OC'd and stable system. Run your test for at least 15 minutes at the maximum ambient room temperature that you expect it to operate at. Then move on to 1/2 hour and then several hours. Always monitor your temps as you test.

Since you asked for settings, I'll be happy to provide mine in another post. I need to get it all written down first.

I'd suggest downloading 3DMark Benchmarking tools from 3Dmark's website. Also do a search for "memtest" and get the Win version. Run it to determine your mem stability.

Get SISandra from their website and run it. It will give you a good idea of what the system will do.

There are a few free tools available for HDD testing. Check the manufacturers site first.

One last bit of advice would be don't let high benchmark scores guide you too much. Having a system that's stable and doesn't BSOD on you is more important than feeling like you need to get benchmarks showing that you are in the 95+ percentile of the fastest PC's on the planet to run even the newest games well.

Use benchmarks to show you the effect of your tweaking and to guide you.

Watch the Temps, be patient and have fun.

Hey! Thank ya for the welcome and the quick replies!

The installation of the MB in the case went without a hitch. I was rather impressed with screw spacing and the fit of the IO port shield. Usually I end up with the 5 dollar cases where a file and tin snips are needed.

The large number of drives are not for RAID I just had them lying around and they all fit in the case so what the heck! My brother told me I should go buy a couple Terra drives but I hates to waste the ones I already have. Specially when I can’t even fill them up.

Yes I did manage to get into the BIOS a couple times and once it even teased me with a boot from Windows setup disk screen. But something is still outta whack cause when I reboot out of BIOS after making changes or click yes to set up from disk the system freezes or goes blank or restarts and tells me it does not have any RAM.

So I pull a CMOS reset on it and try again and end up with pretty much the same results. So I figure I should do some more reading and stop fiddling with the controls on my new alien spaceship before I let the magic smoke out!

So no, as of yet no OS…
But yes sporadic access to BIOS.

And now that I have read these posts and the sticky I got an idea that maybe I should start with one stick of RAM in the last slot and work on getting that stable first. I chose that brand and size of RAM based on the list that was in the ASUS manual.

Will give it another go tonight and see if I can get regular heart beat out of her. 😉